Tennessee, 5 places we take you
Memphis tours tell the whole story in one city: rock and roll was recorded in a storefront on Union Avenue, soul music in an old movie theater on McLemore, and the blues had a street of its own long before either.
From $2,2904 tours that go there
Memphis sits on a bluff over the Mississippi, at the top of the Delta, and for a century it was where people from the plantations came to find work, and where their music found an audience. W.C. Handy wrote down the blues on Beale Street in the 1910s. Sam Phillips recorded Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King and then a truck driver called Elvis Presley at Sun in the 1950s. Stax turned a neighborhood theater into the home of Southern soul in the 1960s.
Our Memphis days start at the studios and end on Beale Street, with Graceland in between for anyone who has waited all their life to see the Jungle Room. We also take every group to the Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum, because the city's music and its history cannot be separated.
4 tours
Nashville and Memphis
Nashville, Memphis
Our most booked trip: three nights of country in Nashville, then down I-40 for rock and roll at Sun, soul at Stax and a night on Beale Street.
From $2,790 per person, double room
See the tourNashville, Muscle Shoals, Memphis, Mississippi Delta and New Orleans
Nashville, Florence, Memphis, Clarksdale, New Orleans
Ten days down the road from Nashville to New Orleans, with the studios of Muscle Shoals, Sun and Stax, two nights in the Delta and three in the jazz city at the end.
From $4,890 per person, double room
See the tourNew Orleans, Mississippi Delta, Memphis and Chicago
New Orleans, Clarksdale, Memphis, Chicago
The Great Migration route in nine days: from New Orleans jazz up through the Delta and Memphis, then overnight on the City of New Orleans train to the Chicago blues.
From $4,590 per person, double room
See the tourMississippi Delta and Memphis
Memphis, Clarksdale
Five days on Highway 61 from Memphis into the Delta, with two nights of juke joints in Clarksdale and the B.B. King Museum on the way back.
From $2,290 per person, double room
See the tourPrices per person sharing a double room; day tours per person. Flights to the start city are optional and priced on each tour.
The places
Beale was the main street of Black Memphis, full of theaters, pawn shops and clubs, and the blues came up from the Delta to play here. W.C. Handy published Beale Street Blues in 1916, and a young Riley King got his nickname, the Beale Street Blues Boy, from a radio show nearby.
Today three blocks are closed to cars at night and every door has a band. Most are cover bands for the visitors, but B.B. King's and a few smaller rooms book real blues players. Our tour leader picks the room and the table, and the walk from the hotel takes ten minutes.
Tours that visit Beale Street
A small brick corner building on Union Avenue, with a guitar-shaped sign on the wall. Sam Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service here in 1950 to record anyone who could pay, and in 1951 Ike Turner's band cut Rocket 88 in the room, a record many call the first rock and roll single.
The studio is the same size it was then, with marks on the floor where Elvis stood in 1954. It still records bands at night. The tour lasts about an hour, and at the end you can hold the microphone Elvis, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis sang into.
Tours that visit Sun Studio
Stax Records worked out of the Capitol Theatre on McLemore Avenue in South Memphis from 1960 to 1975, recording Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the M.G.'s and Isaac Hayes with a racially mixed house band at a time when that was rare in the South. The original building was torn down; the museum is a careful rebuild on the same spot, with the marquee reading Soulsville USA.
Inside are the sloping floor of the old theater studio, a small church moved from the Delta, and Isaac Hayes's gold-trimmed Cadillac turning on a stand. Our Stax Museum guide has what to see and how long to stay.
Tours that visit Stax Museum of American Soul Music
Elvis Presley bought the house on Highway 51 in 1957, when he was 22, and lived here until his death in 1977. It is smaller than most people expect: a colonial-style home with a living room in white and gold, a basement TV room with three sets side by side, and the Jungle Room, where he recorded his last sessions in 1976.
Across the road, a modern complex holds his cars, his two private planes and his stage costumes. We book the tour with a timed entry early in the day, before the crowds, and allow three to four hours.
Tours that visit Graceland
The Lorraine was one of the few Memphis motels that took Black guests in the 1950s and 1960s, and musicians recording at Stax stayed here, writing songs by the pool. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony outside room 306 on .
The motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum, which leads through the boycotts, sit-ins and marches to the room itself, kept as it was that evening. It is not a music stop in the usual sense, but our guests say it changes how they hear everything else on the tour. Allow two to three hours.
Tours that visit The Lorraine Motel
Getting around
Beale Street, the Lorraine Motel and the Peabody Hotel are all downtown and within a few blocks of each other.
For Sun Studio, Stax in South Memphis and Graceland in Whitehaven, about 20 minutes south.
Highway 61 runs south from Memphis into the Delta; Clarksdale is 90 minutes away.
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Tour vanAmtrak trainRiverboatShort flight Map tiles: © Esri, HERE, Garmin © OpenStreetMap contributors. Lines join the stops in tour order in simplified form.
What is included
Best time to visit
Spring and autumn are best. July and August are hot and humid, and mid-August brings Elvis Week, when Graceland is crowded. May has the Beale Street Music Festival in Tom Lee Park.
At a glance
Questions
Yes, on the Nashville and Memphis tour, with the mansion, the cars and the planes. On other Memphis tours it is an optional morning we can book for you.
Sun records bands in the evenings after the tours close. The Stax building is a museum, with a music academy for local students next door.
The three closed blocks are busy and policed on weekend nights. Your tour leader walks there and back with the group.
Yes, on the Blues Trail tour and as a free-afternoon option on the others. We give it a full morning or afternoon.
Nashville is country and songwriting; Memphis is blues, rock and roll and soul. They are three hours apart, and our six-day tour does both.
Nearby
Clarksdale, Dockery Farms, Indianola, Leland
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Ryman Auditorium, Lower Broadway, Grand Ole Opry House, Music Row and RCA Studio B
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FAME Studios, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Florence, Tuscumbia
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